A leaner, meaner corporate regulator with increased powers to identify crooks and come down hard on them is something this country needs.

Australians also need to have their trust in financial planners restored given they are the foot soldiers who influence where much of our $1.8 trillion retirement savings are invested.

ASIC has been operating in its current form for more than 20 years and so it was about time it was given a thorough review of how it is going, including its culture.

To this end the Senate inquiry has fulfilled an important role. The recommendations are constructive and are aimed at creating a regulator that is quicker to act and, more importantly, not afraid to act.

Put simply, the Senate committee wants to build a regulator that is feared by crooks and corporations doing the wrong thing. The aim is to create a more effective regulator. One that is more transparent, accountable and more powerful.

This is all good but the question is whether ASIC has the right culture to make these recommendations a reality? It already has some great powers, it chooses not to use them.

The Senate inquiry was triggered by a series of articles in Fairfax Media that exposed a financial planning scandal inside Commonwealth Bank and the failure of ASIC to act quickly enough. From there senator John Williams called for an inquiry into the performance of ASIC and the bank's financial planning division.

The inquiry looked at the inner workings of ASIC largely through the prism of how it reacted to the CBA, its treatment of the whistleblower Jeff Morris and the decision to enter enforceable undertakings with the bank instead of taking a harder line.

What emerged was that ASIC was onto the bank well before the whistleblower, but it did nothing. It relied on the bank to do the right thing. It didn't and thousands of customers lost their life savings.

It prompted senator Mark Bishop to describe the past practices at the bank's financial planning arm as ''appalling''. He said: ''The conduct of a number of CFPL advisers was unethical, dishonest, well below professional standards and a grievous breach of their duties.''

It resulted in a bombshell recommendation to call a royal commission into the bank's financial planning division. All but one senator on the committee agreed. The dissenting voice was David Bushby who seems to think it would be too expensive for taxpayers to hold another inquiry. What utter nonsense.

As the report says: ''The committee's confidence in ASIC's ability to get the process right this third time is severely undermined and the committee is not convinced that the regulator should be left to manage this matter any longer.'' It said ASIC has shown that it is reluctant to actively pursue misconduct within the two financial planning divisions. ''The committee is also strongly of the view that the CBA's credibility in the CFPL matter is so compromised that it should not be directly involved in future arrangements for investigating the misconduct or reviewing the compensation process.''

This was nowhere more evident than the ineffectiveness of the enforceable undertakings. What emerged from the inquiry was that ASIC didn't stay on top of what was going on and there was little public transparency.

For this reason, the Senate committee dedicates a lot of time to fixing it. This includes requiring stronger terms, ''particularly regarding the remedial action that should be taken to ensure that compliance with these terms can be enforced in court''. It also requests that the Auditor-General consider conducting a performance audit of ASIC's use of enforceable undertakings. These include ''the consistency of ASIC's approach to enforceable undertakings across its various stakeholder and enforcement teams; and the arrangements in place for monitoring compliance with enforceable undertakings that ASIC has accepted''.

Senator Bishop, the committee's chairman, said changes to enforceable undertakings were one of the most important recommendations.

ASIC chairman Greg Medcraft said in a statement last night he used the inquiry to ''learn from the people who made submissions, take a close look at how we do things, and then act on all this to do a better job''.

To this end he has already started to make changes. ASIC has also admitted that its handling of the Commonwealth Bank financial planning scandal left a lot to be desired.